Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing Wing Replacement - The Saga Begins

+1

Great shine already on that gel coat..

PS - What a fantastic colour..!!

Very nice indeed. But just help me, what is that gelcoat? Do the wings are sprayed before or not?

The gelcoat is the shiny outer layer of fibreglass resin and can be pre-coloured so that paint is not necessary.

If the match is good it looks just like paint.

And it looks a good match to me, well done Tim.

+4

Looking good Tim.

+5

+6

Looks good to me, but also new to me! Except for the cost, what are the disadvantages for the gelcoat resp. what can be the reason to respray!

The resin used to make fibreglass wings can be coloured to whatever shade is required by adding dye when the resin is mixed, you just have to be careful to add the right amount of dye to the mix to get the correct shade when the item is made up. This is the difficult bit, as it depends not only on the volume of the resin but also on the thickness of the piece as there's an optical 'depth' element.

Because it's difficult to get exactly right, the usual recommendation is to paint the wings afterwards and no guarantee is given as to the colour match in the resin.

But if you do get a good colour match then there are 2 big advantages: firstly you can avoid the cost of painting the wings, and secondly you don't have to worry about light surface scratches. The colour goes all the way through the wings and so you can polish out minor marks without ever having to paint.

When Sid and Matthew made my wings I asked them to make them extra thick and sturdy. The wings that the racers use are very thin to save weight, but I wasn't bothered about lightness and wanted durability. So they used a double thickness of gel coat, which is the outer layer of resin before you start adding the glass fibre matting, and my wings are around 6mm thick.